How It Works

Our immune systems will detect and inactivate viruses that enter the body. So viruses engineered to kill cancer cells don’t work well if delivered alone (so-called “naked virus”).

Calidi’s platforms deliver cancer-killing viruses by loading them into stem cells, to protect the therapeutic virus from the immune system, until it can reach tumor cells and ultimately destroy them.

Once delivered to tumor by stem cells, the virus is released and infects cancer cells and is amplified – making many copies of itself. Then the infected tumor cells are degraded, killing them and releasing more copies of the virus that infect the remaining cancer cells locally.

In addition to directly killing cancer cells, Calidi’s platforms prompt a second phase of attack, making “cold” tumors that can hide from the immune system become “hot”. The immune system then recognizes and kills cancer cells – even those that may have traveled away from the primary tumor. Immunological memory can then prompt the immune system to attack recurrences, well before they would even be detectable by current methods for monitoring.